The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the
release of GCC version 2.95.2. GCC used to stand for the GNU C
Compiler, but since the compiler supports several other languages
aside from C, it now stands for the GNU Compiler Collection.

This is a minor release to address several bugs in the GCC version
2.95.1 release.

The -fstrict-aliasing is not enabled by default for GCC 2.95.2. While
the optimizations performed by -fstrict-aliasing are valid according
to the C and C++ standards, the optimization have caused some
problems, particularly with old non-conforming code.

The GCC developers are experimenting with ways to warn users about
code which violates the C/C++ standards, but those warnings are not
ready for widespread use at this time. Rather than wait for those
warnings the GCC developers have choosen to disable -fstrict-aliasing
by default for the GCC 2.95.2 release.

We strongly encourage developers to find and fix code which violates
the C/C++ standards as -fstrict-aliasing may be enabled by default in
future releases. Use the option -fstrict-aliasing to re-enable these
optimizations.

The whole suite has been extensively [1]regression tested and
[2]package tested. It should be reliable and suitable for widespread
use.

The GCC 2.95 release has several new optimizations, new targets, new
languages and other new features as compared to EGCS 1.1 or GCC 2.8.
See the [3]new features page for a more complete list of new features
found in the GCC 2.95 releases.

The sources include installation instructions in both HTML and
plaintext forms in the install directory in the distribution. However,
the most up to date [4]installation instructions and [5]build/test
status are on the web pages. We will update those pages as new
information becomes available.

The GCC developers would like to thank the numerous people that have
contributed new features, test results, bugfixes, etc to GCC. This
[6]amazing group of volunteers is what makes GCC successful.

And finally, we can't in good conscience fail to mention some
[7]caveats to using GCC 2.95.2.